South African T20 captain Faf du Plessis believes that his side should have lost Friday night’s first T20I encounter against England at Newlands.
The hosts restricted the visitors to a modest 134 in their scheduled 20 overs mainly due to Imran Tahir’s heroics with the ball as the Pakistan-born spinner ended the innings with career-best figures of 4/21. The 19,000 plus crowd support in Cape Town backed the home side immensely at the halfway stage.
In reply, South Africa never looked like winning the match as wickets began to tumble at regular intervals. None of the South African batsmen were able to stay at the crease for a long time, which meant that Chris Morris and Kyle Abbott went into the final over needing 15 for victory.
The match once again proved that not only the high-scoring but the low-scoring matches can also provide the much-needed excitement and entertainment to the fans. The match was full of drama right till the final ball when Reece Topley missed a game-changing chance to run out Abbott and send the game to a Super Over.
However, the Proteas captain was honest about the fact that it appeared the match had gotten away from them, but he also admitted the fact that this kind of a result would build confidence ahead of next month’s ICC World T20 in India.
Didn’t play the perfect game: Du Plessis
The South African captain said, “Successful teams get over the line even though at times they shouldn’t. The trophy-winning teams that I’ve been involved in over the years … it becomes a habit when you can win games that the other team looks like they can win.
“We’ll definitely take a lot of confidence from that. We didn’t play the perfect game but to still get across the line is a huge credit to us.”
He also said that he is not concerned over the top order's failure to chase down such a modest total. “We sat down after halfway and we discussed that we would try and learn from the England batting,” Du Plessis said.
“We found that they possibly, for that surface, tried to go too hard and by doing that they offered us a lot of chances.
“We know with our batting line-up that if we can have wickets in hand in the last four or five overs we’ve got a very destructive line-up, so that was always the plan.
“Myself and JP were going really nicely there … one of us should have batted through and that’s possibly where we let them back into the game.”
Du Plessis also praised Chris Morris’ match-winning effort with the bat and said, “But Morry (Morris) got a nice knock again tonight and he got us across the line when we shouldn’t have … England should have won that game.”
The second and final T20I of the series takes place in Johannesburg on Sunday.
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